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Strollerderby
How do Dads feel about having less testosterone?
Last week, dads had to deal with the news that having a kid drastically lowers your testosterone levels. For dads with newborns at home, the drop can be as much as fifty percent. That’s a whole lot less hormone coursing through the veins.
How do guys feel about this? A dude from the New York Times asked a bunch of dads how they were taking the news that their bodies actually become less manly when they take care of kids. Reactions to the study are decidedly mixed. Some men feel the need to defend their manliness, while others see it as a good sign.
Ties, Shmies. Here’s what Dad really wants for Father’s Day: To feel like he’s still on the upswing. To feel like he’s not a dork. To feel like he might be kinda sorta slightly cool.
Parenthood has long been equated with the end of one’s hip years. Something about the fact that you have to be responsible and socially acceptable, maybe. A few outliers manage to make the child into an attractive accessory. But by and large, the association runs deep.
Parents are by definition, less hip than non-parents. It’s a rule of the universe, evidence of our obsolescence as the next generation takes over the helm. Right? Maybe not. There’s at least one guy out there who’s out to prove that Dads may be what hipsters are all about.
Go The Heck to Sleep, Sweetie. Please?
Like most writers who trade in the everyday annoyances of parenting, my reaction to the runaway success of the adult storybook Go The F**k to Sleep has been mixed. Like, one part “How awesome is this?” and 87 parts self-flagellation for not thinking of this incredibly obvious genius idea myself. I had a good 8 years on this guy. How could I not have made it happen?
Whatever percentage is leftover (who has time for math? I have children to ignore) has been busily analyzing the answer to that question. The truth of the matter is, if I, or any other mother had written this book, it probably would have taken a very, very different trajectory. This is what I was thinking of this morning, as I was pretending to be taking a long time in the bathroom for biological reasons and really just reading New York Magazine. Then strangely enough, I opened up my computer to find that the eloquent Amy Sohn had already written up my hypothesis.
The Understanding Society Study is an ongoing look at individual, social and family life in the UK, following 40,000 families over several years. In early findings—culled from a sample of men, women and children aged 10-15, the study’s authors report that a child’s happiness seems to directly correlate with how happy his or her mother is in her marriage.
In families where the mother described herself as “perfectly happy” with her marital relationship, almost 3/4 of children surveyed described themselves as “completely happy” with their family situation.In families where mothers said they were unhappy in their marriages, that number dropped to 55 percent.
Interestingly, while children’s family happiness seemed to directly align with their mothers’ marital happiness, the same was not true for fathers.
Ask any dad how much time he spends on childcare every week, and he may overestimate the hours spent changing diapers, feeding picky toddlers, and playing tag in the backyard. In a recent piece at Slate, Katherine Reynolds Lewis says that’s a good thing.
It’s called aspirational lying, says Lewis, the kind of lying we all do to make ourselves look better. In previous generations, men downplayed the number of hours they actually spent with their kids, because child care was considered women’s work. But today’s dads, freed from the bonds of those strict gender roles, want to be the kind of partner that splits childcare 50-50 with their working wife.
They just aren’t quite there yet.
American mothers have long had Sweden to remind us of everything we don’t have: paid maternity leave, high breast-feeding rates, excellent medical care for all, highly subsidized childcare and preschool, and paid maternity leave. Also, did I mention paid maternity leave?
Today, the New York Times is rubbing American fathers’ noses in the glory that is Swedish parenthood in an article headlined, “In Sweden, Men Can Have it All.”
Understatement! Continue reading »
A hundred years ago, feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisioned a world in which parthenogenic women spontaneously reproduced, living in an all-female society of perfect peace and freedom and joy, free from want and war.
She might have been onto something. The Atlantic Monthly just published an article asking if we really need fathers at all.
There’s a mountain of science showing problems for kids who grow up without their dads. Fatherless children are more likely than their peers to suffer problems ranging from attachment issues to asthma. They do worse in school, use more drugs, commit more crimes.
Problem is, most of that science is junk.
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